In early September 1989, I visited the Upper Peninsula for the first time, and Lake Superior as well, including a boat ride on the lake at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Its rocky cliffs were famed long before the federal government made the area the first of nation’s four national lakeshores in 1966, the others being Indiana Dunes, Apostle Islands, and Sleeping Bear Dunes.

I also did some walking. I’m pretty sure I passed by this sandstone formation on foot and took a picture of it looking out toward the lake, though the boat would have passed by it as well (I think). It’s one of those formations that has a name: Miners Castle. This is how it looked in 1989.

In the spring of 2006, the right turret (from this perspective) fell into the lake. According to the NPS, “While the rockfall at Miners Castle on April 13 was startling, such events are not rare along the Pictured Rocks escarpment. At least five major falls have occurred over the past dozen years…

“All the rockfalls involved the same rock unit, the Miners Castle Member of the Munising Formation. Rock units are named for places where they were first technically described. The Miners Castle Member consists of crumbly cross-bedded sandstone that is poorly cemented by secondary quartz, according to U.S. Geological Survey Research Ecologist Walter Loope.”

Pictured Rocks isn’t the only place I’ve seen a noted rock formation later altered by erosion. In 1995, Yuriko and I stopped at a roadside in New Hampshire to see the Old Man of the Mountain. By 2003, it was gone.